Opinion issued in Florida v. Jardines (Updated)

Posted Tue, March 26th, 2013 10:12 am by Kevin Russell

Prior to hearing oral argument in the Proposition 8 case this morning, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Florida v. Jardines, the other dog sniff case (Florida v. Harris was decided last month). In an opinion written by Justice Scalia, the Court affirmed the Florida Supreme Court. The Court held a dog sniff at the front door of a house where the police suspected drugs were being grown constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Justice Kagan filed a concurrence joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor. Justice Alito filed a dissent joined by the Chief Justice, and Justices Kennedy and Breyer.

Justice Scalia’s opinion for the Court resolved the Fourth Amendment question solely on property rights grounds, holding that bringing a dog to conduct a forensic search on someone’s porch constitutes a trespass at common law and, under the reasoning of last term’s GPS case, United States v. Jones, constituted a search subject to the limitations of the Fourth Amendment. While the general public, including the police, generally have license to approach a house’s front door (for example, to leave a flier or ask the occupant to answer a question), that license does not include an invitation to bring a dog onto the porch to search for drugs. If a member of the public did that, Justice Scalia observed, it would “inspire most of us to – well, call the police.” For that reason, the majority decision found it unnecessary to decide whether the dog sniff also violated the suspect’s reasonable expectation of privacy. When the police trespass onto private property to conduct a search, the Fourth Amendment applies regardless of whether the trespass also invades someone’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

Justice Kagan’s concurrence was devoted to explaining why, in her view, the case was an easy one under either a property- or privacy-based Fourth Amendment test. No one would think it reasonable for a stranger to come to one’s porch with a pair of high powered binoculars and peer through the windows. In the concurrence’s view, the dog sniff in this case was no different and no less an invasion of the occupant’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

The four Justice dissent found no support in the common law for the majority’s conclusion that the police conduct here constituted a trespass. The majority acknowledged that the public, including the police, have license to approach the front door. Justice Alito found nothing special about the fact that the police brought a drug sniffing dog with them (after all, “Dogs have been domesticated for about 12,000 years; they were ubiquitous in both this country and Britain at the time of the adoption of the Fourth Amendment.”). The dissenters also did not view the dog sniff as invading any reasonable expectation of privacy given that one can expect that odors will waft outside of a house and, possibly, into public areas where there is no question a dog could sniff for evidence of drugs without constituting a search.

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices will meet for their December 9 conference; our list of "petitions to watch" for that conference is available here.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.